I tend to foster drama via bleakness. If I want the reader to feel sympathy for a character, I cleave the character in half, on his birthday. And then it starts raining. And he’s made of sugar.

Saunders is jokingly describing a deliberately heavy-handed way of manufacturing pathos: pile misfortune upon misfortune until sympathy becomes unavoidable. The escalating absurdity—birthday, cleaved in half, rain, and finally “made of sugar”—satirizes melodramatic storytelling that tries to coerce emotion through bleakness rather than earning it through character truth. At the same time, the line acknowledges a real craft temptation: writers can “foster drama” by intensifying suffering, but Saunders’ comic exaggeration implies that such tactics can feel manipulative or cartoonish. The quote thus doubles as a self-aware critique of cheap sentimentality and a reminder that effective empathy usually arises from specificity, humanity, and moral complexity, not merely from calamity.